With the proliferation of information on the Internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to prepare and deliver content to users in an efficient and timely manner. Current content delivery systems generally employ two content publishing techniques. The first one involves the dynamic publication of static content (e.g., web pages) to the web tier. Typically, most web sites are produced by in-sequence publishing actions. For example, a set of web pages can be generated on a chronological basis by an application server and made available to a web server for appropriate actions. In other words, to implement a web site, a set of web pages may be produced at an application layer and published at a presentation layer. These layers are part of the seven operating system (OS) layers known in the art.
In response to a user request, the web server may operate to deliver one or more of web pages to the user. If that user elects to “refresh” the delivered content (e.g., by clicking a “Refresh” button on a browser application's menu), the same content may be delivered to the user again. All of the web pages implementing a web site can be updated as needed or reproduced at some regular interval to incorporate changes in the content. However, all of the web pages implementing the web site may have to be reproduced. Moreover, changes made to the content may only be taken into account at the intervals at which the web pages are reproduced. Thus, web pages delivered to a user may, for a period of time, contain stale content. In addition, reproducing web pages for each and every web site affected by certain changes may require a long period of time.
Another content publishing technique involves portal applications or standard Java® service or Server Page (JSP) applications. These applications typically have dynamic scripting capability that can work in tandem with hypertext markup language (HTML) code to separate the logic of a page from its static elements (e.g., the actual design layout and display of the page). The extracted portion of the page can then be used to make dynamic database queries and assemble pages on-the-fly accordingly.
Within this disclosure, term “portal” generally refers to a gateway that is or can be a starting site, a home site, or an anchor site for networked users visiting the World Wide Web (WWW or web). Examples of portals include www.yahoo.com, www.cnet.com, www.microsoft.com, and www.aol.com. A portal is a kind of web site with a rich navigation structure of internal links within the same site and external links to other sites. In some cases, a company may provide one or more portals connecting the company's intranet to the web. Currently, most portals adopt a style of categorizing content with a text-intensive, fast loading web page. Services provided by portals or portal sites typically include a directory of web sites or links, a search facility to search for other sites, news, weather, email, stock quotes, maps, and so on.
A portal site may comprise portlets or portal pages through which a plurality of channels and sub-channels of content can be presented to end users. Large scale portal sites capable of handling a high volume of content are typically built with a few “page templates” that can be reused over and over again to display content. For example, in response to a user request, a portal page may be assembled on-the-fly based on a page template. In this manner, content displayed on the portal site can remain up-to-date and not all pages of the portal site must be reproduced.
Web sites and portal sites, particularly large scale portal sites, are generally produced and managed at the server side, transparent to end users. While content delivery systems employing JSP or portal applications offer many advantages, there is no automated process to coordinate update activities in the backend. More specifically, update activities made by and at a content delivery system may not be automatically propagated to a content management system. Conversely, update activities made by and at the content management system may not be automatically propagated to the content delivery system.
Therefore, there is a need for a new system and method for the dynamic provisioning of static content for network delivery. Embodiments of the invention can address this need and more.